On June 7, the Department of Science and Technology held an advisory Council to directly assign the implementation of the provincial pilot project in 2017, "Pilot application of technology for early warning and detection of vortex/Rip currents in Back Beach, Vung Tau City”, to Ass. Prof. Dr. Mai Van Cong as the project leader. The Vietnam Netherlands Center for Water and Environment- Thuyloi University is the lead agency.

The project aims at analyzing, selecting, developing and transferring technology for early warning and detection of vortex/Rip currents to improve the effectiveness of warning and rescue activity at Back Beach, Vung Tau City.

Back Beach, Vung Tau City is a popular tourist destination in Vietnam with a long and beautiful beach. However, vortex/Rip currents occurs frequentlybecause the geographic nature of the seabed in Back Beach is typically in “animated three-dimensional” structure; The underwater sand dunes tend to be oblique to the sea; The deep grooves between the two sand dunes change from 3 to 6 o’clock position create vortex/rip currents, which flow at about 0.5m/s to 2.5m /s. Recent statistics shows that there werearound 10,000 bathers per day at peak peak period and thousands of lives were saved annually by rescue teams. While the rate of successful rescue attempts is relatively high compared to that of the world, unfortunate accidents still happen.

The advisory Council highly evaluated the feasibility and practical significance of the project and agreed for pilot implementation after completing and supplementing some contents as suggested by the Council.